Banks must anticipate customers’ needs and embed financial services into everyday transactions to compete with digital platforms, executives from Access Holdings and OPay told Moonshot by TechCabal in Lagos.

Daniel Awe, head of Fintech Foundry at Access Holdings, said banking’s next phase would require institutions to offer services when customers needed them, rather than wait for people to visit a branch or open an application.

“The future of banks is going to be in everyday people, where banks become invisible,” he said during a panel titled “The Next Bank: Competing in the Age of Programmable Money”.

His argument extends the shift from branch banking to mobile services. Moving a transaction onto a phone changes how customers access a bank; integrating finance into activities such as paying school fees or replenishing stock changes when they encounter it.

“When the customer is engaging you, it’s not the future of banking. It’s the banks that now have to place themselves in the life of the customer,” Awe said.

Chukwudinma Okafor, chief compliance officer at OPay Nigeria, said the starting point should be customers’ practical needs, rather than the availability of new technology.

“For us at OPay, the major focus is just to address one thing, and that’s customers. You have to meet the customers where they need you,” he said.

OPay sent developers, technology professionals and sales teams to markets across Nigeria to observe how traders worked and gather feedback, Okafor said. Requests for different sounds to signal successful and failed point-of-sale transactions illustrated how small changes could make a service more useful.

The example highlighted a distinction in the discussion: anticipating customers’ needs can involve sophisticated infrastructure, but the improvement customers value may be straightforward.

Modernising the systems

Awe said traditional banks would also need to overhaul the infrastructure supporting their products. Conventional core banking systems alone were insufficient for competing with fintechs and technology companies offering financial services.

That transition would have to be gradual, preserving reliability and compliance while addressing the risks created by increasingly interconnected systems.

“Whatever you want to achieve, you have to put security in the middle,” he said.

Okafor said digital-first companies had benefited from starting with more modern infrastructure, including cloud-based systems, while established banks were increasingly adopting similar technologies.

Despite their competition for customers, both speakers argued that banks and fintechs remained dependent on one another.

Awe said partnerships combined banks’ financial capabilities with fintechs’ ability to serve particular customer groups. Some businesses required approaches that companies such as OPay could provide more readily, he added.

Okafor pointed to fintechs’ reliance on commercial banks for settlement and the handling of customer funds. Cooperation was also necessary to respond to fraud when money moved between institutions.

“Ultimately, we need each other for the ecosystem to work well,” he said.

The discussion also turned to Nigeria’s approach to cryptocurrency and stablecoins, with Awe describing differing priorities among regulators.

He said the Securities and Exchange Commission had shown greater appetite for cryptocurrency-related activities, while the Central Bank of Nigeria had been more cautious because of monetary policy and consumer protection concerns.

According to Awe, the central bank was examining stablecoin use cases through a regulatory sandbox, allowing approved participants to test services under supervision.

He characterised stablecoins as less volatile than other cryptocurrencies. That distinction was his assessment of their appeal to the regulator, rather than a guarantee of their stability.

For banks weighing new technologies, the broader challenge identified by the panel was to make services easier to access while maintaining the security and reliability customers expected. Becoming less visible in a transaction would require substantial work on the systems behind it.

Grey, the Y Combinator-backed cross-border payments company, is looking to use foreign currency salary records to help remote workers access credit, addressing a gap in how traditional lenders assess professionals earning internationally.

Speaking on the Moonshot Podcast at Moonshot by TechCabal 2026 in Lagos, Nigeria, Idorenyin Obong, Grey’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said many remote workers struggle to establish creditworthiness because conventional credit bureaus have limited visibility into income earned from foreign employers.

He said Grey plans to use income and transaction data accumulated over the past six years to develop credit services for these customers.

“This is built on our own data and income intelligence from the last five to six years,” Obong said.

The planned offering forms part of Grey’s expansion into salary management following the launch of Paycheck on Wednesday. 

The product allows professionals earning in US dollars, British pounds, and euros to automatically divide their salaries between spending, savings, and emergency funds.

With Paycheck, Obong said that a customer receiving $1,000 monthly could choose to allocate 20% to savings, another 10% to other financial needs, and retain 70% for immediate expenses. Users can adjust these allocations rather than follow a fixed spending formula.

Eligible Paycheck customers can also earn up to 3% annual interest on their US dollar Pouch, Grey’s savings feature. The product includes an emergency fund designed to help users work towards saving three months’ salary over a year, alongside salary tracking and other account benefits.

“We need to build a bit more around the lifestyle of salary customers; if a customer wants to save, we can help them with that, and then offer them interest. If a customer wants to travel, we can help them with that,” Obong said, adding that Grey is looking to support flight bookings and provide eSIMs for customers travelling internationally.

“That was where the thinking came from. We still saw a gap here because I think there’s a lot of innovation we could still build for our customers; we saw that gap and decided to start with it.”

Grey’s move underscores the changing needs of remote workers who initially used cross-border fintech platforms primarily to receive foreign payments. 

As international employment becomes more established, these customers increasingly need tools to manage their earnings, build savings, and potentially access loans.

However, Grey has not announced when the credit feature will become available or disclosed its proposed lending rates and borrowing limits.

For now, Paycheck is starting with customers earning at least $300 in foreign-currency salaries. 

While salary management and savings benefits are already available, Grey’s planned credit offering could extend those services to remote workers whose international earnings are often overlooked by traditional lenders.